Malignant incompetence and serial bungling define not only Trump’s war against Covid-19 but every aspect of his presidency. This is why it’s all too easy to believe reports that he dispatched Rambo wannabes on a knucklehead mission to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
In “Trump Indicts Maduro. Putin Says, ‘Go Ahead, Puppet, Make My Day!’” (March 27), I warned that Trump might see launching a wag-the-dog war as his best re-election strategy. But even I did not have this magnitude of incompetence and bungling in mind:
An American mercenary captured after a bungled attempt to topple Nicolás Maduro has claimed he was on a mission to seize control of Venezuela’s main airport in order to abduct its leader – and he alleged that was acting under the command of Donald Trump.
Luke Denman was one of two US citizens seized by Venezuelan security forces this week after what appears to have been a catastrophically conceived bid to overthrow Maduro by sneaking into the South American country in a fleet of battered fishing boats.
(The Guardian, May 6, 2020)
Hell, as military blunders go, this makes former President Jimmy Carter’s infamous attempt to rescue American hostages in Tehran look heroic. Unlike Carter, though, Trump has shown time and again that no blunder can cause him any shame. Simply put, he has none.
Only God knows the truth of what happened in this case. But, as Trump himself demonstrates daily, truth hardly matters in politics these days.
What matters is that these captured gringos just gave Maduro a gift more valuable than all the oil Venezuela can ever drill. Oh, right; I just had cause to publish “Here’s Crude Evidence That Oil Ain’t Worth Sh!+ These Days…” on April 27. Give it a few months …
The point is that, given the way Maduro is showing them off for all the world to see, he knows their value all too well.
That said, if you rely on the American media for your news, this might as well have happened on Mars. Because there seems to be a conspiracy of radio silence afoot across the spectrum.
Of course, I get why Trump propaganda machines like FOX, OAN, and Breitbart would want to pretend there’s nothing to see there. But even liberal networks like CNN and MSNBC seem willfully unaware.
Even The New York Times buried this story in the Americas section – as if it’s more about Maduro claiming to have captured these mercenaries than about Trump allegedly dispatching them to capture him. Thank God for outliers like Democracy Now and The Daily Beast, which ran a consolation report today under this appropriately Trumpian banner headline:
Trump Just Inspired the Dumbest Damn Coup Plot in LatAm History, Complete with a QAnon Crazy
I am on record decrying the American media’s groundhog-day reporting on the fight against Covid-19. Therefore, I am dumbfounded that liberal networks are not seizing this opportunity to open another front in their attacks on Trump’s kakistocratic presidency. Because, trust me, but for Covid-19, they’d all be reporting on this story like it’s, well, Covid-19.
Frankly, I smell a rat – down there in Venezuela, and up here in America too. But you know Fidel Castro must be laughing his ass off in his grave, thinking estúpidos presidentes gringos, they’ll never learn. And, yes, Obama had his “Bay of Pigs” too, which I duly wrote about in “Cuban Twitter: Obama’s Bay of Pigs…?” April 9, 2014.
But, truth be told, Woody Allen’s spoof “bananas” (1971) might be the more apt analogy in this case.
Related commentaries:
Trump indicts Maduro… oil…
Obama’s bay of pigs… Fidel Castro…